Strong friendships can help voting spread like a contagion.

Despite the importance of Congressional representation, barely a third of eligible US voters cast a ballot in the most recent midterm elections. Various get-out-the-vote campaigns have been tried, and many of these have been shown to have a positive effect on voting, but most of them are too focused to reach a large portion of the population. Now, some researchers have tested a method with a good deal more reach: an appeal to potential voters via Facebook. Thanks to the heavy use of that social networking service, the study had the largest experimental population I've ever seen, at 61 million.

On the day of the midterm election, every potential voter who logged in got an ad that encouraged them to vote. And, to a small extent, it worked—voting among those users edged up ever so slightly, and was enhanced when their close friends voted. Given the size of the appeal, this small boost translated to hundreds of thousands of additional voters.

The procedure for the experiment was remarkably simple. Anyone in the US who was over 18 and logged in to Facebook the day of the 2010 election was enrolled in the study. The authors note that this probably makes the numbers they obtained an underestimate of the procedure's effects, since some of these people will have logged in after polls closed.

The subjects were divided into three groups. One control population group, with a bit over 600,000 subjects, didn't receive any special message. Another population of 600,000 was shown a message encouraging them to vote, a link to a site that would help them find the local polling place (clicks were tracked), and a button to click that registered that they had voted, along with a running count of users who had previously clicked this button (clicks were also tracked). A third group—and this was the big one, with over 60 million people—got the same encouragement and buttons, but the buttons were accompanied by a set of profile pictures of friends who had also voted.

The setup tracked the number of people who looked up polling information, along with the number that claimed they had voted. To verify the accuracy of this self-reporting, the researchers compared it to the public voting records of 6.3 million people.

The intervention had a small effect but, with a study population this large, it was actually possible to measure even a tiny influence. Those who received the message to vote accompanied by social cues were 0.39 percent more likely to vote than the group that received no message. But they were also that much more likely to have actually voted than the group that had been urged to vote without any accompanying social cues. In fact, the authors found that there was little difference between not receiving a pro-vote message and getting it without any reminders that their friends were voting.

That may seem like a minimal impact but, nationwide, this would be expected to boost the voter population by 340,000 people. Presumably, some of them voted in highly competitive races.

As you might expect, however, people cared more about appearances than actually voting. When it came to self-reported voting (through the button displayed in the tests), the socially enhanced message got a full two percent more people to say they had voted.

To track how social cues worked, the authors estimated the strength of a friendship by seeing how often pairs of users had interacted over the preceding month. In the population for which the authors had voting data, weak friendships had no effect, but voters gave closer friends a significant inducement to vote, and even weak friendship boosted self-reported voting. So, the authors conclude, "Ordinary Facebook friends may affect online expressive behavior, but they do not seem to affect private or real-world political behaviors. In contrast, close friends seem to have influenced all three."

This is a sign of what's referred to as "social contagion," where a behavior spreads through groups via strong social links. In the case of voting, the social aspect ended up being stronger than the direct appeal of the image that suggested people should vote. The authors estimate the direct impact of the ad as pushing 60,000 people to vote, while the added effect of social contagion accounted for 280,000 additional voters.

The authors note that past studies of online inducement had suggested they had little effect on voting behavior. However, generating social contagion in a familiar context, like that of Facebook, may be easier than other approaches—after all, everybody hates chain e-mails, but forwards on all sorts of crap via Facebook. And given that the effect was small, it was probably pretty easy to miss it in studies without a 60 million-strong experimental population.

18 Reader Comments

The procedure for the experiment was remarkably simple. Anyone in the US who was over 18 and logged in to Facebook the day of the 2010 election was enrolled in the study. The authors note that this probably makes the numbers they obtained an underestimate of the procedure's effects, since some of these people will have logged in after polls closed.

And what about those in the US and over 18 who are not citizens (legal and illegal aliens) and therefore cannot vote? If they were included, then they are going to throw off the numbers. Last time I checked, Facebook doesn't have a tick box for citizenship status. (I haven't used Facebook in a long time, so if it does... then I'm thoroughly frightened.)

I imagine that that the problem isn't so much registration as it is people simply not getting to the polls. Voter registration drives are almost always targeting very young people or impoverished people in my experience. I would also like to bring up a loaded topic which is that it's complete bull that people are allowed to vote in the US without showing some form of valid ID. As an independent it greatly angers me knowing that Democrats are fighting these laws NOT because of the poor people who don't have/can't get ID's but because illegal immigrants vote Democrat more often than not. When I work at a local soup kitchen/food pantry the vast majority that come to us have official ID. It just so happens that that ID happens to be a Mexican ID often times. The only reason we need ID is when they are seeking assitance for help with paying bills we have to track them to make sure they aren't abusing the system and getting assistance too often. Granted I live in an urban area so my experience may be out of whack with poor folks that live in the sticks who REALLY want to vote but can't get a Government issued ID for whatever reason.

I imagine that that the problem isn't so much registration as it is people simply not getting to the polls. Voter registration drives are almost always targeting very young people or impoverished people in my experience. I would also like to bring up a loaded topic which is that it's complete bull that people are allowed to vote in the US without showing some form of valid ID. As an independent it greatly angers me knowing that Democrats are fighting these laws NOT because of the poor people who don't have/can't get ID's but because illegal immigrants vote Democrat more often than not. When I work at a local soup kitchen/food pantry the vast majority that come to us have official ID. It just so happens that that ID happens to be a Mexican ID often times. The only reason we need ID is when they are seeking assitance for help with paying bills we have to track them to make sure they aren't abusing the system and getting assistance too often. Granted I live in an urban area so my experience may be out of whack with poor folks that live in the sticks who REALLY want to vote but can't get a Government issued ID for whatever reason.

I read recently about a study on robo-calling. In spite of the expense of getting celebrities for the recordings and the equipment and phone bills etc, neither celebrity endorsements nor robo-calls nor the mash-up of the two seemed to have any measurable effect on voter turnout (although the study was significantly less than 60+million). What did have an effect was a phone "survey" containing loaded questions designed to get people to envision themselves voting. Questions like:"What time of the day do you plan on voting? Which voting location is most convenient for you? Where will you be coming from when you go to vote? Where will you go after you vote? Who will you share your voting experience with? - and where? - and when? - and how?" etc.

Maybe it's not a good idea to encourage more apathetic people to vote.

Agreed.

K1LLTACULAR wrote:

I imagine that that the problem isn't so much registration as it is people simply not getting to the polls. ...it's complete bull that people are allowed to vote in the US without showing some form of valid ID.

Generally, little to no effort is made to verify if a voter is legitimate. And if a voter does appear to be illegitimate, nothing happens to them. I've been at the poll desk before, when someone beside me gave their name. The poll worker told them they had already voted. The person then turned around and left.

It's possible this person was trying to vote twice, it's also possible that one person was trying to use another persons name. When all you have to show is a Utility bill as proof of ID, it's pretty easy to cheat the system. Honestly, it's ridiculous to require a lower level of ID to vote than it takes to buy a pack of cigarettes.

I'm still baffled that the United States have no form of required ID card for every citizen, when my country is considered the tail of Europe and has implemented biometric cards recently. Nor that there is no kind of registration neither at state nor federal level for someone to be eligible to vote.

As an independent it greatly angers me knowing that Democrats are fighting these laws NOT because of the poor people who don't have/can't get ID's but because illegal immigrants vote Democrat more often than not.

However, I would argue that we should hold as a principle that any citizen should, on the day of an election, be able to decide they want to participate and vote. Of course it will need some appropriate controls, but I think that should be our goal.

EDIT:And the NH one was also upheld because it provided for a phase-in period and allows people to vote who don't have an ID by being photographed and signing an affidavit.

EDIT2:And please provide evidence that any non-citizens, legal immigrants or otherwise, vote. Then demonstrate that is more than a fraction of a percent of all voters in a state.

Nope. He has written two. Total.1. Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy (2004, ISBN 1-59403-061-8)2. Cleaning House: America's Campaign for Term Limits (1992, ISBN 0-89526-516-8)Um, anyway, so the fuck what? John Fund is a douche-bag. As evidence of his douche-baggery, I present the following, from his Wikipedia entry:"John H. Fund (born April 8, 1957) is an American political journalist and conservative columnist. Currently a senior editor of The American Spectator . . . He also collaborated with Rush Limbaugh on another 1992 book, The Way Things Ought to Be . . . transcribing it from tape and editing it."Personally, I have, at this point, heard enough about a right-wing propaganda spewer's opinion on voter fraud. Allow me to expand my previous point:Voter fraud is statistically and otherwise a non-issue, regardless of how much supporters of the GOP would like it to be or how many books full of lies and FUD they write. It happens so infrequently that there is no effect whatsoever on results and no reason to enact laws to guard against something that just doesn't fucking happen. Unless, of course, you're trying to steal this election, too.Former Florida GOP chair testified UNDER OATH that voter ID laws are meant to keep black Americans from voting.http://www.salon.com/2012/07/27/fla_rep ... ack_votes/Just go here and get schooled:http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-a ... rs=eml_tds

Nope. He has written two. Total.1. Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy (2004, ISBN 1-59403-061-8)2. Cleaning House: America's Campaign for Term Limits (1992, ISBN 0-89526-516-8)Um, anyway, so the fuck what? John Fund is a douche-bag. As evidence of his douche-baggery, I present the following, from his Wikipedia entry:"John H. Fund (born April 8, 1957) is an American political journalist and conservative columnist. Currently a senior editor of The American Spectator . . . He also collaborated with Rush Limbaugh on another 1992 book, The Way Things Ought to Be . . . transcribing it from tape and editing it."Personally, I have, at this point, heard enough about a right-wing propaganda spewer's opinion on voter fraud. Allow me to expand my previous point:Voter fraud is statistically and otherwise a non-issue, regardless of how much supporters of the GOP would like it to be or how many books full of lies and FUD they write. It happens so infrequently that there is no effect whatsoever on results and no reason to enact laws to guard against something that just doesn't fucking happen. Unless, of course, you're trying to steal this election, too.Former Florida GOP chair testified UNDER OATH that voter ID laws are meant to keep black Americans from voting.http://www.salon.com/2012/07/27/fla_rep ... ack_votes/Just go here and get schooled:http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-a ... rs=eml_tds

Good luck linking The Daily Show to someone who thinks Rush Limbaugh writes believes in Rush Limbaugh.

Maybe it's not a good idea to encourage more apathetic people to vote.

MAJOR agreement here... if you don't know the issues, don't know the candidates position on important topics, only vote for someone because mom and dad do, or vote only on demographic characteristics, then DO NOT VOTE. Go to a movie instead on election day.

Maybe it's not a good idea to encourage more apathetic people to vote.

MAJOR agreement here... if you don't know the issues, don't know the candidates position on important topics, only vote for someone because mom and dad do, or vote only on demographic characteristics, then DO NOT VOTE. Go to a movie instead on election day.

If excitement to vote is equated to knowing the issues, how do you explain the tea party?